Is It Just Me, Or Is It Getting Warm In Here?

From Newsweek, via MSNBC, comes an article by MIT meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen arguing that alarm over global warming remains unjustified. That’s not to say Lindzen denies global warming or that human generated greenhouse gases are contributing to some extent to that warming trend. Indeed, he readily acknowledges both to be true.

In fact, Lindzen almost exactly mirrors my own entirely inexpert opinion on global warming, which is as follows: (1) it is almost certainly occurring, (2) there is increasingly good evidence of a human contribution to global warming, though estimates of the extent of that contribution are hard to come by, (3) it remains unclear what, if anything, humanity either can or should do about it.

The problem, as my former co-blogger Thoreau has pointed out on a number of occasions, is that discussion of global warming tends to confuse scientific and policy issues. Not being a scientist, I lack credibility to speak to the scientific issues first hand, so I have tended to ground my own guarded skepticism about those issues in the work of fellow skeptics whose intellectual integrity I trust and who have taken the trouble of investigating those issue with some care. You need not be a scientist to understand scientific findings any more than you need to hold a doctorate in philosophy to understand or evaluate ethical arguments. You do, however, need to be reasonably intelligent, thorough and open minded.

Critics of global warming skeptics have tended to attack them on one of those three grounds in roughly ascending order; that is, the skeptic is stupid, cherry-picks the data and / or has some conflict of interests undermining his credibility. One of the more amusing things about the Lindzen piece is its disclaimer at the end stating “His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.” This, in turn, was challenged by several comments, though perhaps tongue-in-cheek, claiming that because the U.S. government allegedly has vested interests in the issue, Lindzen’s views are suspect. So it goes.

I receive no funding from any source, more’s the pity, but I do definitely have prejudices, not so much on the issue of global warming but on the issue of global warming policy. They’re really two entirely different issues and should be kept separated as much as possible. More importantly, rhetorical flourishes should be kept to a minimum. The heat-to-light ratio in the global warming debate is already bad enough.

Unfortunately, Lindzen himself doesn’t do this. On the one hand, he lays out in general terms some of the problems with some of the possibly more exaggerated scientific claims of global warming activists. On the other, he writes about the economic impact of attempts to redress global warming including the mandated use of ethanol and the likely effect of carbon caps on energy prices.

Of course, Lindzen doesn’t need to be an economist to write about economic policy any more than I need to be a meteorologist to write about global warming. But when he writes “There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe,” my sensors start to alarm. “Compelling” is a pretty damned high standard. Wouldn’t the better, more useful adjective here be “sufficient”? And don’t we need a better sense from both sides of the debate as to what exactly would minimally qualify as a catastrophe? I think so.